Dear project members,
here's the periodic report of what has happened in DPL land, this
time during May 2012. It's briefer than usual, as this year I've
enjoyed the lovely French habit of frequent holidays during the
month of May.

Highlight

First highlight for this month is an invitation to us all. We're
now in June and the Wheezy freeze is literally a few days away. The
RC bugs count is moving in the right direction, but it's still
stellar if we want to ensure a short freeze. And a short freeze is
of paramount importance: it'll reduce the time during which we
can't implement great plans for the future, increase the
"freshness" of software we'll ship with Wheezy, and reduce the
inconveniences for those who run the testing suite due to its nice
"rolling" feature. So please set out some regular time to do RC bug
squashing, by providing patches and doing NMUs. Releasing Wheezy is
not something that could be outsourced to the Release Team, it's a
collective responsibility that kicks in as soon as our own packages
are RC bug free (which they already are, right?

The second highlight is more on the internal structure camp. As
mentioned last month, I've discussed with the tech-ctte insisting a
bit to set up periodic IRC meetings, to ensure outstanding issues
get periodically reviewed. At the end of May the first IRC meeting
has happened, and has been very productive. See the minutes.
Another one has been scheduled, trying to setup a monthly cadence,
for the end of June. Many thanks to all tech-ctte members who have
took part in and helped with the meeting organization.

Communication

I've given an
interview to iTWire, answering a number of questions about
several past and future Debian challenges.

Discussions

The ongoing discussion to harmonize packaging of multimedia
software between the official Debian archive and the unofficial
debian-multimedia.org archive (dmo) has progressed.
I've tried to help the two groups reaching an agreement on
which packages belong where, so that both duplicate packaging
efforts and user inconveniences are minimized. That seems not to
have worked and dmo maintainers have simply announced that they
will move away from the current domain name to a new one that does
not include "debian" in its name.

Sprints

There will be a Debian Science
sprint in June, co-located with the broader
Debian Science event organized by European Synchrotron
Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble. I've confirmed my attendance
for the opening talk of the conference day. ESRF organizers have
kindly sponsored travel for all Debian attendees, many thanks to
them!

Another
sprint will happen next week-end in Paris, this time by the
i18n/l10n team. I've approved the corresponding tentative budget
for travel sponrship for ~2'000 EUR.

Other expenses

Hardware replacement plans go on. We've ordered SSDs (for ~3'000
CAD) for recently bought machines meant to replace bugs-mirror,
bugs-master, and udd. On the "small emergencies" front, we also had
to replace failing disks on wagner (1/2 of alioth), for as little
as 100 GBP.

Miscellanea

I've helped a bit with the ratification of the Debian diversity
statement by seconding it and shortening the discussion period

on the multimedia front, I've also sought legal advice for the
multimedia team, to better understand how to provide a decent
multimedia experience for Debian users while respecting the
draconian copyright system that exists almost world-wide. There
seem to be some solutions in sight for the few missing packages
(which I'm still discussing with the respective maintainers), but
they'll hardly be ready for Wheezy

three people replied to my call for help with DPL tasks
(thanks!). I'll be shortly contact them to share the list of tasks
that can be outsourced to anyone willing to help; then I'll try to
setup a calendar of periodic IRC public meetings. There's still
time to apply if you are interested (hint hint!)

on behalf of Debian, SPI has entered in the ISC Forum Membership
Agreement, giving access to the Debian security team to security
notices for softwares like BIND and DHCP. We previously had a
similar agreement for individual maintainers, but it's good to move
it at a project level, in order to diminish bus factors

Happy Wheezy freeze,
and RC bugs squashing!

PS the boring day-to-day activity log for May is available at
master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.201205